Accelerated SAP ERP, Enterprise Resource Management Implementations

In 1995, the drums of the North American press began to pound out an impatient rhythm: SAP takes an eternity to implement. In 1996,

that pounding turned to a steady, noisy beat and, in the spring of 1997, SAP America unveiled its new methodology for implementing R/3. It

was called Accelerated SAP or ASAP for short. After myriad improvements to this methodology in the intervening ten years, it is now called ASAP Focus.

ASAP Focus, to its credit, has a rational AS-IS phase and there is a treasure trove of tools that will help you to speed up the process, such as a pre-canned project plan, an exhaustive erp inventory of business processes (related to SAP module chains), and a large number of template forms and procedures.


Further, ASAP is built as a Microsoft OfficeTM kit, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, MS Project plans, and PowerPoint slide shows. It is possible to tweak the method by either including other documents or revising those that are offered to suit your needs and context.

Once this methodology was released, consulting firms immediately raced to complete implementations faster and faster and the marketing world was dotted with ads and announcements like “Roadrunner Corporation Completes SAP Implementation During Long Lunch Break!.” The five

basic steps are:


1. Project Preparation

2. Business Blueprint

3. Realization

4. Final Preparation

5. Go-Live


Project elements that will accelerate an implementation:

1 Visible, measurable criteria for success

2 Mastery of scope

3 Transfer of SAP knowledge from consultant to client

4 ASAP - for its accelerator tools.

5 Knowledgeable management commitment


Note that 60% of the project is devoted to blueprinting and realization. In the blueprinting phase, a client and systems integrator collaborate to design the over-all enterprise model and then the business processes that will address that model. In the course of this work, there is usually a lot of

debate between various client members as to the process design. These debates tend to include arguments such as “that’s not how we do it here” answered with “but this is how we should be doing it.” Clients who accept new business processes based on best industry practices can avoid these costly

arguments and by consequence vastly reduce blueprinting. When best practices are adopted, configuration is also reduced since the best practice processes are already configured.


Such adoption is usually far easier for small and medium enterprises and thus fully accelerated implementations occur more often in that arena.

In such a scenario, project preparation is more costly due to the process validation required to identify which processes can be fully adopted and which will require some process change.


By consequence, blueprinting costs are vastly reduced as are configuration costs since the best practice processes are pre-configured.

The result is a cost savings of 24% with a similar compression in the time to Go-Live. In essence, the greater the adoption of best practices, the higher the savings. In many, many cases, clients have no blueprinting costs at all.


Says Mark Dendinger of VSS: “The reduction of blueprinting gives impetus to an implementation project. Clients love to see fast results from pre-configured business processes and the acceleration improves team morale.” You may ask, “Where do these best practices come from?” The answer is that they are culled from

more than 30,000 clients across seventy industries. In other words, the trailblazing has long since been accomplished, so why would your firm feel the urge to get out machetes to hack new trails? The bottom line is that adapting to best practices is not a “one size fits all” proposition but a “one

way best fits most” proposition.


SAP provides a frequently-updated chart regarding implementation duration. The most recent chart claims that 61% of all implementations are completed in less than 9 months with the majority of implementations for firms with <$200M in revenues being six months or less.


An SAP solution implemented with the SAP ASAP Focus methodology ..read more..click attachment below: